The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory (Routledge Handbooks of Classics and Theory)

New directions in queer theory continue to trouble the boundaries of both queerness and the classical, leading to an explosion of new work in the vast―and increasingly uncharted―intersection between these disciplines, which this interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore.

This handbook convenes an international group of experts who work on the classical world and queer theory. The discipline of Classics has been involved with, and implicated in, queer theory from the start. By placing front and center the rejection of heteronormativity, queer theory has provided Classics with a powerful tool for analyzing non-normative sexual and gender relations in the ancient West, while Classics offers queer theory ancient material (such as literature, visual arts, and social practices) that challenges a wide range of modern normative categories. The collection demonstrates the vitality of this particular moment in queer classical studies, featuring an expansive array of methodologies applied to the interdisciplinary field of Classics. Embracing the indeterminacy that lies at the core of queer studies, the essays in this volume are organized not by chronology or genre, but rather by overlapping categories under the following rubrics: queer subjectivities, queer times and places, queer kinships, queer receptions, and ancient pasts/queer futures.

The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory offers an invaluable collection for anyone working on queer theory, especially as it applies to premodern periods; it will also be of interest to scholars engaging with the history of sexuality, both in the ancient world and more broadly.

Ella Haselswerdt is an Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA. She has broad interests in poetics, aesthetics, and reception, and has published on the dreamscapes of the ancient body, the soundscapes of Oedipus at Colonus, the mythic geography of Philoctetes, and philology as a site of queer liberation. She has two current major projects: the first explores the conceptual, expressive capacities of the tragic chorus via trauma theory, queer theory, and posthumanism; the second is a multifaceted approach to Sappho and contemporary lesbian identity, under the rubric "Deep Lez Philology."

Sara H. Lindheim is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (2003) and Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire (2021). She has also co-edited with Helen Morales New Essays on Homer: Language, Violence, and Agency (2015), although her work generally focuses on gender and subjectivity in Latin poetry of the late Republic and the Augustan Age.

Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College. He is the author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (2014), and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2nd ed., 2018); he has co-edited with Ruby Blondell Ancient Sex: New Essays (2015) and has published essays on various ancient authors, Michel Foucault, and Clint Eastwood.